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Advocacy

When people have a great community experience, they like to spread the word. Your community’s features can make it easier for your biggest fans to tell your story for you.

Our Advocacy Blueprint is a guide for creating a social environment where you can more easily identify your advocates and empower them. It shows you how to give a megaphone to people who are motivated to praise your brand across your websites, mobile apps and social media destinations.

Blueprint Goal

Our Advocacy blueprint helps your enthusiasts communicate their enthusiasm. It creates an environment in which they are rewarded for creating word of mouth. And it opens up channels across which the word can spread.

Audience Hot Buttons

Successful Advocacy communities take advantage of well-understood group dynamics: some people like to show off their expertise, others like to be helpful, and still others are hungry to build a reputation.

Communities that score high on Advocacy

Create lots of opportunities for member contribution
Reward influential contributors
Make it easy for them to make high-value contributions (e.g., word of mouth, referrals)

Nestlé rewards its influential contributors with Brownie Points.

The Community Experience

Kraft First Taste does a great job of mixing interesting product content with content submitted by influencers.

The Advocacy Blueprint shows you how to create community features that identify members who are likely to generate word of mouth, recognize them, and empower them to advocate on your behalf within your community and across the social Web.

Identifying enthusiasts is about defining relevant community behaviors, and then tracking them
Recognizing influencers involves public or private rewards for particular contributions or behaviors
Empowering is easy: make it easy for advocates to do what they’re already inclined to do.

Community Building Blocks

The Advocacy Blueprint recommends the use of particular social applications that have predictable word of mouth value. Each blueprint element stands alone, but Advocacy really takes off when you combine all of the blueprint elements in your community. Social applications with value in an Advocacy context include::

SFGate makes it easy for enthusiasts to spread word of mouth to Facebook, which has led to substantial growth in return visits

Topical Discussions. Blogs, forums and comments all give committed contributors a platform for communicating their enthusiasm.

Member Badges. This is a powerful lever that – with Pluck – gives community managers a lot of flexibility around identifying, rewarding and promoting influential community members.

Social Connections. One-on-one influence is also important. Pluck’s profile application, Personas, lets your advocates befriend other community members, message them privately, and connect with others outside of your community.

Social Media Bridges. Word of mouth and referrals really take off when enthusiasts’ contributions are allowed to travel from your community to the broader Social Web.

The Advocacy Blueprint Delivers

The giant food brand has created a nearly 900,000-member community that is dedicated to advocacy. The Kraft-friendly members are exposed to new Kraft products, and then are given a pulpit from which to communicate their enthusiasm to their friends and to Kraft product managers.

Advocacy at Kraft First Taste

Enthusiasts at Kraft First Taste have expanded their influence, and the community has seen dramatic growth

Advocacy at Kraft First Taste

Membership - Kraft’s First Taste community has grown to nearly 900,000 members

Community growth - Kraft’s recent monthly community growth has averaged 40,000 members

Standout stat - The average monthly growth rate in First Taste influencers in 2011 is 40%

SFGate.com is the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle. SFGate has always been an innovator around online community. It has created a number of sections that address local concerns with a social flavor. SFGate was among the first to leverage Pluck’s support for Facebook Connect, a feature that makes it easy for enthusiasts in the community to broadcast to their Facebook friends what they’re doing in the SFGate community. Enabling this sharing has paid off very nicely for the publication.

Empowering Influencers at SFGate

SFGate has given a steadily stronger voice to its sizable population of influencers

Advocacy at SFGate.com

Membership - The SFGate community has almost 440,000 members

Facebook referrals - YOY growth in Facebook page view referrals grew 225% after one year

Standout stat - Implementing Pluck’s support for Facebook Connect led to a 700% jump in Facebook page view referrals

Very Best Baking is a site dedicated to baking how-to’s, with a large and rapidly growing membership. Nestlé surfaces brand advocates through its use of Brownie Points, which get awarded for community participation and contribution. While individual point awards are modest, there nonetheless are 10 community members whose influence in the community has earned them more than 110,000 Brownie Points. The top influencer has earned a quarter million Brownie Points. Nestlé is doing a terrific job of encouraging community leaders to come forward, be actively involved, and ultimately help create an experience that has drawn nearly 100,000 new members in five months.

Giving Influencers a Voice at Nestlé Very Best Baking

Nestlé aggressively recognizes and rewards influential community members. Their contribution has remained very substantial even as the community has almost tripled in size.

Advocacy at Nestlé’s Very Best Baking

Membership - Very Best Baking has attracted nearly 190,000 members

Influencers - The community has 10 members with 100,000+ Brownie Points

Standout stat - On average each of these influencers contributes nearly 200 pieces of content per month to the community

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